1. Yes, correct. Sort of like the concept of the magento layered navigation which i am currently using.

2. I would like to filter any collection by the variants applicable to the products in that collection.

3. About 12 sizes for my main collection products .. but other collections might only have 3 or 4 .... but I'm curious what difference that could make to the filter if the products in the collection have 3 or 4 attributes or 20+ attributes.

There are a few limitations to keep in mind, yes.First and most importantly, this app DOES NOT make querystring variables suddenly work for any Liquid template or snippet in a Shopify store. ONLY the liquid snippet (and it must be a snippet) that you specify when you install this application will be affected using ONLY the application's specific proxy URL (by default this is /a/collections).Also, built-in Shopify/Liquid pagination will not work properly when this application is used to manually filter products from being displayed. Unfortunately there is no way currently to pare down a collection into a new array and paginate that array within Liquid syntax.However, it should be possible to utilize additional querystring parameters to provide for basic pagination functionality. Using the for loop syntax of limit: and offset: along with variables that indicate how far into the collection we have previously searched should do the trick, although it will be virtually impossible to know how many pages of results there are overall until you get to the end of the collections products. We will post some additional working sample code later once we have the opportunity to implement this. Feel free to send over any code you write if you beat us to it. Also, the "infinite scrolling" technique of pagination might be recommended here (a "SHOW MORE" button at bottom of page) (http://uxmovement.com/navigation/infinite-scrolling-best-practices/).

Thanks Caroline. I will review & research those details later this evening. Unfortunately I cannot write the code myself by would need to find a developer. I have been trying to assess if Shopify can meet my needs and whether it is worth transferring from Magento. So based on the above, it sounds like it is possible but would take some work? :)

We are trying to do this as well. I couldn't find anything useful and that would be SEO friendly for filtering not just the variants but, also metafields.

Caroline, I sent you an email asking about filtering, can you help or give me good direction on how to achieve filtering of a 3000 product database with and without using product tags?

We sell apparel and costumes with varying sizes (small, medium, Large, One Size, Standard, etc.) in about a 100 or so collections and need an easy way to allow the customer to sort and filter down to what they are looking for in our store.

Hi, Brad here from Power Tools - we have just released an app that can help with this problem. It is called the Variant Tagger, and is part of the Power Tools Suite. It will tag your products based on the variant titles/options, and will even un-tag the items when they are sold out/unavailable.

It was designed to improve the Filter Menu app, such that size and color filters work with sold out items, but it can also be used as a standalone feature.

How does the url structure work for the Power Tools? For SEO we need the filter's criteria to come after a special character (like the question mark ?) to let Google and others know to ignore that part of the url. Otherwise, they will count that as a separate url and with 1000's of combinations, the indexed urls will cause a shop to have index bloat thus resulting in pages that don't have any value to search engines.

Hi Brian, Power Tools uses the existing URL structures that Shopify uses - it does not add URL's as such. I think your question is best resolved by an SEO professional however I would make the following statements:

1) There is an assumption in your answer that more URLs are worst for your store - as stated by Google themselves you will rarely, if ever, be penalised for duplicate content.

2) If you are concerned about this then using the canonical tag or nofollow attributes is an option

3) The Filter Menu pages are of value to search engines, hence I would want them to be indexed

4) I am yet to see a site that I have verified as being negatively affected in search engines after installing Power Tools (specifically traffic and SERP), although your mileage may vary.

We've recently completed development on an application that solves this problem. It does NOT use tags and instead uses product variants. This becomes very useful for shop owners with large data sets especially when being pulled in from an external data source (i.e. - Erply).